


Kent

by PunkHazard



Series: Kent [4]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-12 20:27:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16878618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunkHazard/pseuds/PunkHazard
Summary: Hera allows him a few seconds of silence. Just a few."Explosions aren't an adequate substitute for human emotion, Jacobi."





	Kent

A week of 'finding ways to not be alone' finally ends in failure when Minkowski pre-emptively ends their game of poker, citing a headache, and tells Jacobi that she's turning in early. He makes two good attempts at cajoling her to stay, knowing that Eiffel and Lovelace will soon follow, and sure enough he's quickly the only one left in the rec room. 

For all that the Hephaestus crew acts like some big, happy family and have more or less welcomed him into it, Jacobi still finds it just a _little bit_ difficult to fall asleep on the same vessel as them.

Sure, they've made a few concessions-- allowed him his old room to be shared with Eiffel; Lovelace, Minkowski and Pryce in Maxwell's. Lovelace had taken the liberty of clearing his room of all weapons and explosives and potential explosives, but at least the door still locks and Hera doesn't have non-vital access to any of the sleeping quarters. That was something Kepler had personally seen to when the Urania was still under construction. 'I can monitor the sleeping habits of my team without an A.I.,' he'd said to Cutter. 'I do _not_ believe you want several months' recordings worth of what my officers do in their sleeping quarters. Alone. Every other night.'

Jacobi had overheard that snippet of conversation, torn between indignation at his boss's implication and gratitude that he'd even speak up for them. He really _wouldn't_ rather Goddard Futuristics have recordings of what he does in his sleeping quarters alone, like, twice a week. At most. 

"Jacobi?"

Jacobi startles, looking down and then quickly gathering the deck of cards he's allowed to slip out of his hand and scatter across the floor. Readjusting to gravity would take just a little while longer. He pitches his voice deliberately cheery and answers, "What's up, Hera?"

She asks, "Can we talk?"

"We've been talking," he points out.

"I've been trying to catch you before I report to Minkowski," she says, "since I think you should know about it first. But if you're not ready to talk, I'd understand. It can wait."

He starts fidgeting with the cards, turning flipped ones back to face the same way as the others, cutting and shuffling the deck as he considers Hera's words. "About what?" he says, even though of all the things they might have to talk about, there're only two subjects that Hera might like to discuss with him and only one of those is liable to set him off. His relationship with Alana was, in all ways, _uncomplicated_. He liked her, and he trusted her. She was his best friend. She had never, ever done anything to make him doubt that despite all the ways that he'd let her down over the years. 

Jacobi's pretty sure he'll miss Alana for the rest of his life; that he'll spend that time trying to live in her stead, to do what she would have done, knowing that he'll inevitably fall short. She deserved better than SI-5, but she'd _chosen_ Jacobi and there aren't many people in the world who've done that and stuck with their decision.

Which leaves--

"Kepler."

Jacobi inhales. "I don't want anything to do with him right now, Hera."

"I think you'll want to hear this," she says gently. "But I can come back another time."

"What is it?" 

Daniel comforts himself with the idea that he'd been chosen for his ballistics expertise-- not his impulse control. 

"I've been going over ship-wide recordings of when I was in Doug's mindspace," says Hera, "and I found out what he was up to while we were taking care of Pryce."

"Why," says Jacobi, incredulous, "would you wanna _relive_ that?"

"Morbid curiosity, Mr. Jacobi." Beat. "Anyway, you'll want to hear this."

He hopes it's something _especially_ reprehensible, something that'll let him stop _missing_ Warren Kepler's steely smiles, his smooth drawl. The impression he gave of tenuous calm floating in a thin film over a roiling lake of nitroglycerin; how it so neatly hid the icy expanse underneath. Jacobi's pretty sure that he tallied up all the numerous little frustrations he had with the team just to whip them out for those occasions when he had to put on a show. Maybe he was strangling puppies-- although Daniel begrudgingly admits to himself that he was never much of a dog person anyway, so the colonel can do what he wants with the puppies. 

Maybe he was disrespecting Alana's memory. That's one thing that could put anyone on the shitlist. 

But whatever Hera has, maybe it'll let him stop regretting that he hadn't done more to help a man who didn't want his help.

"Let's have it," he tells Hera. "Can't be worse than anything else he's done."

Daniel listens to the recording. He listens to Kepler's _No, nothing's wrong_ , and his _To be where I had to be to make a difference,_ but what he hears is _Thank you, Daniel, and goodbye._ Whatever knife Kepler had eased into his back over the years twists as it comes back out, and he asks Hera to play the segment twice more before he finally has a picture in his mind. He's known Kepler for so long that he can see every expression, his straight-backed posture, every smug twist of his bastard mouth. 

"Four hours?" He drags his hands down his face. "That was..."

"Immediately after negotiations with Cutter," Hera confirms.

"What the hell was he thinking?" He's not _Maxwell_. He's not even Jacobi. Kepler was competent on Goddard tech, able to use all intended functions with no problem, but he'd never done hacking like Maxwell or jury-rigging like Jacobi. His most common adaptation on the fly usually entailed bullets and screaming. "He doesn't know how to cover his tracks," Jacobi scoffs. "Pryce would've found out. Was he planning to wipe them all out up there?"

"I think so," Hera answers softly. "He might also have been expecting that the crew of the Hephaestus would stay and fight. Honestly, it worked out better that they did, or else it would've been a delay of maybe an hour. Tops. Not a whole lot of time to finish the job."

Jacobi covers his mouth with both hands, seals his nose with the top edge of his palm until he's successfully suffocated the urge to heave. "I don't think he knew about Cutter being bulletproof," he says, choking back every other thought in his head. The ones that sound suspiciously like _He knew I would be on the Sol, heading back to Earth_ , and _How are you still stupid enough to believe he might've done it for you?_

"No, I don't think so."

He groans, digging his palms into his eyes. Scrubs. His heel starts tapping against the floor. "God," he says. "I hate him so much."

"Jacobi?"

"I..." His fingers itch, some warm prickle crawling from the base of his spine up his back. His entire body feels too warm for the room, feverish in a temperature-regulated environment. "I need to blow something up."

Hera allows him a few seconds of silence. Just a few. 

"Explosions aren't an adequate substitute for human emotion, Jacobi." There's no pity in her voice, which isn't new for Hera, but is certainly refreshing. The rest of the crew has been tip-toeing around him lately. "Even I know that."

"But _I_ know this ship has a detonation chamber," he says, forcing his voice to stay even, to keeps its sarcastic inflection, "so if you'd be so kind as to give me access--"

"I'm sorry," Hera interrupts, and she really does sound apologetic, "but you're restricted to your room and common areas."

That hurt a lot more than it should've; after all, the detonation chamber was specifically designed for him to be able to test explosives on the way to whatever interstellar outpost they were assigned to. "Hera--"

Someone opens a door, walks inside. Comes to a stop behind the couch. "Jacobi," they say.

"Lovelace," Daniel replies. Maybe Hera had called her. Wouldn't be the first time she's been summoned to deal with him. "Commander," he says, plastering on a smile and turning to meet her eyes, "could you do me a real big favor and--"

"Sure. Hera?"

"Captain, are you sure?"

Lovelace smiles, her expression so very mild for the breathtaking cunning the woman is capable of. "We can do some explosions," she says, kindly, and pulls him to his feet. "Come on, Jacobi."

"I know I've said some pretty mean things to you in the past," he says, falling into step behind her, "but I take them _all_ back."

* * *

Once inside the lab, Jacobi rigs a few nuggets of C4 liberated from his personal stash, linking them up to set each other off and compound each explosion-- minimally, considering the size of the detonation chamber. A little pancake round to test his limits, familiarize himself with the inventory, and warm up. Lovelace has pulled up a chair next to him as he sets to work on his next bomb, this one designed to burn up _just_ enough fuel to leave a vacuum, send shrapnel to the very edge of the clear impact-proof glass without hitting it. Calibration.

He's sitting on the floor in front of the chamber, squinting at a readout on the laptop in front of him, hands pausing briefly as he redoes the math in his head to account for the Sol's artificial gravity, when Lovelace smacks him on the back of his head.

"Ow," he says. 

"Stop that."

"Stop what?"

Lovelace raises an eyebrow. "Imagining you're in there."

Jacobi glances at the setup still sitting in the center of the chamber. He pulls his goggles down from his forehead, sets it so the familiar, worn foam pad lays across the bridge of his nose. Then he picks up the remote detonator and sets it off, carefully tracking the explosion and making sure to look very proud of it for doing exactly as it was designed to. Lovelace, to her credit, doesn't flinch. 

"I'm not," he says.

" _Wishing_ you _could be_ in there," she amends.

He turns the detonator in his hand before he sets it back down and pulls a bundle of copper wires closer. It's not quite what he was looking for, but it'll do. "I'm not."

Lovelace eyes the haphazard jumble of wires in his lap, a few of them sloppily stripped and several others frayed, left as he'd found them. This isn't exactly a life-and-death bomb, of course he'd be... a little less meticulous than usual. He's _grieving_. "Mm-hm," she says.

Daniel pulls his goggles down to hang around his neck and picks up a pair of clippers, begrudgingly stripping the wires to bomb-ready state, cutting them down to eliminate frayed ends. Even though it shaves nearly a minute off his build time. " _You_ stop that," he mumbles.

She nudges his leg with the toe of her boot. "Stop what?"

Scowling, Jacobi looks up at her, one arm curled protectively around the device in his lap. He motions at the space between them with his free hand, blinking rapidly. "Whatever _this_ is," he snarls. "You're not Alana. You're not Kepler. You don't _get_ this kind of access to me."

Lovelace scoffs. "What access?"

"Just sit there and enjoy the fireworks." He turns back to his bomb, trading the clippers for a screwdriver. "That's all you get to do, if you absolutely _have_ to be here."

Beat. 

"Do you want me to leave?"

She's not Kepler. She's not Alana. He can, under most circumstances, ask them to leave him the hell alone and they'd do so. He's never asked on company time and he's never asked when they couldn't oblige, but when he did, they'd listen. SI-5 was big on giving each other space. 

"No," Jacobi sighs, not wanting to alienate himself from the crew of the Hephaestus even more, "just--"

He cuts himself off when her hand settles on his shoulder, squeezes lightly through the material of his shirt. "I'm not," says Lovelace, "gonna take it personally."

The one time Kepler _hadn't_ left was when they were stuck in that brig together. Still so sure of Jacobi's loyalty. Still so sure of his resilience, even after being informed otherwise. His trust and respect hadn't _felt_ like anything but that for so long, and Jacobi used to be so proud of it. Being able to do everything Kepler asked of him, to his exact specifications, with or without all the information. The sheer amount of freedom he and Alana were afforded. 

"Yeah," he mumbles. "Yeah, could you leave? Promise I won't do anything stupid."

At the time, the idea that Kepler answered to someone else had rocked his world. Sure, Daniel had always been _aware_ of people higher up in the food chain, that there were people who gave Kepler orders, that those were the orders he relayed, that they all followed. Still, SI-5 played so fast and loose with Goddard protocol that Cutter's influence had seemed distant. As much of a murderous psychopath as Cutter was, Kepler had buffered the team, absorbed the shock, delegated each task so none of them would ever take the full brunt of psychological consequences. Usually took care of the nastiest bits himself.

After that particular conversation, Kepler had sat next to him. Waited for him to process his new worldview. Maybe Kepler appreciated not being treated with kid gloves; maybe in his weird, deserted hellscape of a mind, he liked that Jacobi didn't care that he'd just lost an arm, that he'd lost control of the station, that he was in an indescribable amount of pain. Maybe he thought that dragging him through the mud at his weakest, most vulnerable moment meant Jacobi knew he could take it.

The two of them sat in silence for the rest of that day, but Kepler had put his remaining hand on Jacobi's back, between his shoulder blades, and left it there, whatever too-late and inadequate words that he couldn't bring himself to say burning a hole through Daniel's chest.

"I'll be outside." Lovelace stands in one smooth, graceful motion. Her hand leaves his shoulder. "Hera, turn off all monitors in the lab."

* * *

"Captain?" Hera asks as Lovelace makes her way back to the rec room. 

"Hm?" 

It's a tasteful, minimalist space. The first time Lovelace had stepped foot in it, it'd felt sterile, unnerving and unused despite the coziness of its decor. Thankfully, in the week or so since the Hephaestus crew has been in possession of it, the upholstery's managed to pick up just enough staining and engine grease to make it look inhabited. Pillows on the wrong couch, watermarks on the wooden coffee table in the center of the room, unwashed dishes in the sink visible from the living area. 

Hera waits for Isabel to sit, kicking her feet up on the table, to ask, "Did you really want me to turn off all the monitors?"

"No," she answers, crossing her arms behind her neck, "keep your visuals. Let me know if he does something really stupid, and I'll go in there and stop him."

"Is it okay to leave him in there? I'm... worried."

"Don't be."

The silence stretches on for another few seconds, and Lovelace waits patiently for Hera to process the necessary... whatevers. Memories. Emotions. Possible scenarios.

"But how do you know?" she asks, at last.

Lovelace closes her eyes, nestles into her seat. "I lost my crew, too." Saying so still leaves a bitter, cloying taste in the back of her mouth, a dull throb in her molars after so many months of gritting her teeth. Memories of Lambert, Hui, Fourier and Fisher aren't as fresh as they used to be, no longer as sharp, don't cut so deep. It only takes a moment to catch her breath and move on. "Do you know what kept me going when I thought I was the only one left?"

"Paranoia and revenge?"

Hera's not _wrong_ , and Lovelace cracks open one eye to glare at a camera in the far corner of the room. But she lets it slide. "Knowing that... there are people who still have to pay for it." Short, and sweet. Her voice stays even, almost silky, as she adds, "Knowing that if I'm not the one who makes sure of that, they probably never will."

"You," Hera tells her, annoyingly chipper, "have _us_ now, captain."

She concedes the point with a nod. "Another crew to babysit did help. Do you think Mr. Ballistics Dummy feels the same way?"

"I know he likes us, but he doesn't think he's _one of us_." Hundreds of hours of interactions with Jacobi, summed up so simply. "Now, knowing what happened to Kepler? What he had with him and Dr. Maxwell? I'm not sure he ever will."

"He's not gonna find that again," Lovelace says.

"No."

"Yeah, well. That's life."

* * *

Jacobi waits until the door shuts behind Lovelace to get back to work. Maxwell always teased him for it, but he liked to talk to himself when he was alone, speak out loud. It gave him another level to process his own thoughts-- first in his head, then as he says them, and last as he hears them again. " _Stupid_ colonel," unsurprisingly, is the first thing he says to the device in his hands as he begins to dismantle it. "How's 'need to know' working out for you now, huh?" 

'Need to know' used to be a point of pride, too, almost as much as it frustrated. They could finish the job without _needing to know_. How's that for trust? Alana had always chafed at that, maybe instinctively understanding that lack of information would be the thing that kills her. "You don't think I would've _helped_?" he snarls, letting a handful of screws roll off his palm into a little cluster on the floor. "That maybe we couldn't've gotten out of that together? That maybe I _needed to know_ which side you were on?"

He takes off each panel of the bomb in silence, salvaging the accelerant entombed in its center before he sets aside the gutted explosive. "'Course not," Jacobi sighs, pushing himself to his feet to raid the hazmat cabinet for powdered lithium and calcium; a bottle of flaked magnesium. "I turned on you, right? How were you gonna trust me again after that?"

_'Sir, Jacobi has shown exemplary skill and dedication throughout--'_

Daniel groans, loud enough to drown out the memory. "' _On their side_ '," he scoffs, grabbing a handful of paper from inside a desk drawer, returning to his former spot with an armful of loot. "You ever get tired of bullshitting? You ever get _tired_ of pulling my ass out of the fire?"

Mumbling to himself: "I don't even get to hate you now. Bet you would've been alright with that. Being hated? You were used to that. Lots of people hate you. _Including_ me."

That part was mostly true, though all the people who still hated Kepler were the ones smart enough not to go _after_ him. CEOs of companies that had been folded into the company, people who would rather pretend they didn't know about SI-5's collateral damage. Usually helped along with hefty payouts from Goddard to forget that whole mess. 

"The one thing you _couldn't_ handle? Heh."

* * *

"We," Jacobi had said one muggy summer in 2011, staring into a duffel bag containing no fewer than sixty pounds of C4, "do not need nearly this much plastic." He had assumed there were other things in there, like guns and ammunition (thirty pounds of which had turned out to be _strapped to Kepler's body_ ), but no, the major had personally hauled an entire sixty pounds worth of deadly combustibles through about a mile of hostile terrain. Jacobi had brought his own supply of explosives and detonators in a pack that would've fit several grad school textbooks, at most. It was really all he needed to complete the 'destroy evidence' phase of the assignment, as was his designated role.

They'd been working together for nearly half a year at that point. Kepler sometimes allowed him an obscene amount of autonomy in the field, laying out mission parameters, restrictions, goals, and then letting him loose. So long as he stayed within the letter of the law, the major would have very little to say other than 'Nice work, Jacobi' or 'When I said to leave the pool house undamaged through interrogations, I did _not_ mean to destroy _every last standing structure around it, **Mister Jacobi**_.' 

The letter of the law had been adjusted over their last few missions while Kepler worked out how Jacobi operated, no longer beholden to a clear-cut military objective but to the messy, unpredictable needs of corporate espionage.

Whatever else he'd set out to accomplish today, clearly he only trusted Jacobi with a minuscule portion of it. The part where he waited outside while Kepler retrieved the prototype and brought it to him to dismantle, document, and destroy.

" _I_ need this much plastic," Kepler had retorted. "There's a reinforced underground bunker that needs to go down."

"We can use a third of this to collapse a bunker, and have the rest in reserve to... what was it, facilitate extraction." Jacobi had grinned, instantly at ease in the presence of _that much_ C4. "Lot of amateurs think they have to plant these at equal distances around a perimeter, but we can use a whole lot less if we know which of the walls are load-bearing."

Kepler had raised a brow at the implication that he, seasoned intelligence operative that he was, might be an _amateur_ at anything. He'd seemed curious. Almost pleased that Jacobi had pointed out a weakness in his plans. That Jacobi had begun defaulting to 'we' instead of 'you'. "Do... you know which walls are load-bearing, Jacobi?"

"From the layout, I can make an educated guess." Ballistics involved more than enough demolition for him to have a pretty good grasp of how buildings were constructed, after all. Besides, he probably wouldn't need more than 8 out of 10 correct guesses to meet the objective of leveling this particular mansion. "Since you're going inside anyway, sir, I can give you notes."

"Notes are not going be necessary," Kepler had said in the same tone of voice he used when he locked them both inside a room with a live bomb on Jacobi's first ever assignment in the field, "seeing as you're coming with me for the retrieval."

They'd stared at each other for a long moment. 'Not part of the mission briefing,' Jacobi was tempted to say. 'Not a retrieval specialist because your last one died,' he was tempted to say.

"That sounds like something you don't need an explosions guy for," Jacobi had drawled, recognizing the challenge, the implicit demand that he rise to it, "but just for you, Major, I'm gonna give it the ol' college try."

Kepler'd had a softer expression on his face then-- six years ago, he hadn't yet been totally subsumed by the job. That came with time, every grisly scene, each new assignment that necessitated putting down the heart that went with his human suit. At some point along the way, he'd forgotten to pick it back up altogether, but in that first year with Jacobi, he was still quoting Shakespeare. There were still occasions that the man behind the artist formerly known as Warren Kepler would step out for an encore. 

"That which ordinary men are fit for," he'd said, flashing a crooked smile, "I am qualified in. And the best of me is diligence."

"One of these days," Jacobi had threatened, zipping up the duffel and slinging it across his shoulder, stumbling at the weight, "I'm gonna read King Lear, and you're gonna have to stop that 'cause I'll know what you're referencing and I bet it's really lame."

"It is an extraordinary play, for men of good taste." Kepler had turned to him, flipping a Beretta out of the holster under his arm and passing it handle-first to Jacobi, eyes laughing as he reached for another gun. "You'd hate it."

* * *

Jacobi sniffs, folding a scrap of paper around a eyeballed mix of powdered barium and cadmium, and a short, thick fuse. "You were just gonna waltz out of there and join up with the rest of us once you saved the day, weren't you? You knew that I would vouch for you. Had it all figured out, but you--"

_'Dost thou know me, fellow?'_

"Stupid, Warren." Jacobi shapes his mouth around the name again, unfamiliar and strange. He'd used the colonel's name even less than Kepler'd ever said 'Daniel'. " _Monumentally_ stupid. Screw your 'need to know'."

Sometime in Jacobi's second year with Goddard, Kepler stopped referring to Shakespeare altogether. Daniel did eventually read the play; he's a math-and-science guy and not an understands-middle-English guy but he did read enough Cliffnotes to know that Kepler had pegged him for a voice of honest reason in their first conversation, loyal to the end to a deteriorating king. 

Flattering to neither of them, maybe fitting for both. 

"You'd _hate_ to be missed, wouldn't you?" 

Jacobi strings up his last batch of explosives, linking their fuses as he stands them upright on little makeshift mortars. He sets a timer on the detonator, and backs out of the chamber. The first of his explosives combusts in a shower of red and silver sparks.

"Well, too damn bad."

He never did have the guts to quote Lear back at Kepler.

* * *

"Hey," Jacobi says, politely announcing his presence to the back of Lovelace's head as he enters the rec room. "Thanks for letting me have the lab, captain."

She looks at him over her shoulder, shuffling to the side to make room for him on the couch. "No problem." Lovelace pats the cushion beside her, and bumps him lightly with her shoulder when he sits. She makes no mention of his bloodshot eyes, or the hoarse scrape of his voice. "Feel better?"

He does a quick inventory and comes to the conclusion that he mostly feels raw, and stupid, and light. "I'll get there," he answers, and is pretty sure that's the truth.

Very casually, Lovelace asks: "What do you plan to do when you get back to Earth, Jacobi?"

"If you're thinking about recruiting me to your crusade," he shoots back, "it's not gonna happen." 

"What? Why? Where else are you gonna go?"

"Goddard is still... well, I still believe in it. I think without a wackadoo creep like Cutter on board, it'll keep doing what it's doing." He inhales, stretching his sore, aching ribs across expanding lungs. "Some of it's bad, but a lot of it... was good. A lot of projects in development are really gonna help people, and I'm not standing in the way of that. But I'm not gonna try to stop you, either."

"Sure."

"I just... need to go somewhere quiet for a while."

"I get that," Lovelace says.

"Thanks. Good to know I've got your approval, captain."

"Jac _o_ bi."

"I actually meant that sincerely, you know." He shakes his head, resigned. "Just can't help myself sometimes."

Lovelace looks at him for a few seconds, her expression flat. "I've got a vacation to Bermuda planned," she offers. "If you'd like to come along. Haven't booked tickets yet."

"Bermuda? Nah, that place is crawling with Goddard personnel." Jacobi rubs his palm across his mouth, brows furrowing at the twist of surprise on her face. "You didn't know? There's an inter-dimensional research facility out there. You want beaches, try Miami." He smiles, brittle and slow, but it stays. "Now, you _think_ all those people are gonna be a pain to deal with, but the secret is... the more people there are, the more they're gonna ignore you."

SI-5 experience, clearly. 

"You want to come hang out in Miami for a couple weeks, Jacobi?" She props her elbow on his shoulder, pressing her weight against it. He pushes back, counterbalancing her with a lean of his own. "See if I can't change your mind?"

_See if we can't destroy Goddard for taking our families away from us?_

He drags it out for a while, makes a show of trying to decide. Cracks some wise about how busy he'll be upon landing, how many dates he's already lined up to have now that Goddard Futuristics doesn't own his life. He keeps it up until Lovelace grabs his ear, playfully twisting it until he doubles over, shoulders shaking. "Okay, ow! _Ow!_ " Then he's laughing for real, giving in with a light shove to her ribs. "Yeah," he says, "okay, maybe I'm down for Miami."

**Author's Note:**

> title is in reference to the duke of kent, in king lear. (also check out [@schwarzbrot](http://schwarzbrot.tumblr.com/post/180293536539/schwarzbrot-small-doodles-as-im-neckdeep-in-wolf)'s si-5 cause that's what got me into this in the first place)
> 
> ... i also just realized that they were on the urania and not the sol, so edited to fix all references to it


End file.
